SAN ANGELO, Texas - Ever wonder what it’s like to be in a place where your brash leader spends a lot of his time threatening to nuke Washington? Where he brandishes a pistol, and makes a big thing of the notion that no one will tread on him?

Well, you can save the bucks for that long flight to North Korea. You can have the same experience right here in Texas.

That’s right. Instead of copying former San Antonio Spurs pro basketballer Dennis Rodman and going to break bread with Kim Jong-Un — the young North Korean leader you see on TV — you can just stay tuned for Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s latest move.

When he’s not knocking off coyotes while jogging with his laser-aimed pistol, or pledging to veto any new taxes, he often spends time charging that Washington is doing everything wrong.

That charge helped him handily defeat Texas’ former senior United States senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, when she challenged him for the governor’s job in the 2010 Republican primary.

Perry successfully hung around Hutchison’s neck the whole “too much Washington” theme. That included the considerable number of “earmarks” — special project spending detailed by one or more members of congress, that don’t go through the normal appropriations process.

Until then, Hutchison had considered obtaining earmarks a plus. Aren’t members of congress supposed to bring home the bacon for their districts? She sure did.

Instead, Hutchison ran from Perry’s charge, and even wound up voting to end earmarks.

Had she counterpunched — asked in a news conference in Corpus Christi why Perry thought $262,000 for equipment and renovations for the Driscoll Children’s Hospital was a bad idea; or in Houston why Perry was against $285,000 for the digital mammography system for the Harris County Hospital District; or in Fort Worth why Perry opposed a $1.52 million bridge over the Trinity River; and so on across the state — Perry’s charge might have backfired.

This is the trap that Perry has set for himself with his latest nuke toward Washington. He is saying that Texas won’t accept Medicaid expansion that would add a million or so Texans to those covered by medical insurance.

The feds say they’ll pay 100 percent of the expansion cost for the first three years, and 90 percent for years after that. One group figured that Texas would have to invest about $15 billion over 10 years to draw down $100 billion in federal benefits.

And if Texas doesn’t expand Medicaid, its citizens will continue to pay federal taxes anyway. It’s just that the part that might have helped pay for the Texas Medicaid expansion will instead go to other states that participated.

Perry’s opposition is in spite of the fact that other Republican governors who initially opposed the idea, such as Rick Scott of Florida, Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Jan Brewer of Arizona, have all signed up for the program.

Perry says the Medicaid system is broken, and that it should be fixed before being expanded.

Meanwhile, the cry to take the money is coming from medical associations and other groups, plus several city chambers of commerce — not exactly hotbeds of liberalism.

They point out it will create tens of thousands of jobs.

County officials say failure to accept the money will continue to raise property taxes that now fall on local taxpayers by default.

The idea that federal matching money is simply bribery to the states is not new, and isn’t incorrect. Of course it is.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas adroitly used it to get states to do what he thought they should be already, in areas such as education, environmental protection, health care and others.

And President Barack Obama, with far fewer Democrats in Congress than LBJ enjoyed in the 1960s, is using it to try to expand health care — including Medicaid.

Texas legislators and others reportedly are quietly seeking to figure out some semi-graceful way for Perry to get out of the corner into which he’s painted himself and declare some kind of victory over the Washington beast.

But he may not. Stranger things have happened. He may be running for president again in 2016, and seems bent on positioning himself to the right of every other potential candidate.

Perry repeated to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview recently that he’ll plot his political plans with family and friends after the Legislature finishes its current session at the end of May.

By then, cleaning things up may need more than sending Dennis Rodman on a goodwill mission to square up North Korea’s leader.

Given its complexity, saving Perry may require the Harlem Globetrotters.